TF1 Selects Ascent to Integrate News, Sports Production

January 29, 2008

Ascent Media Systems & Technology Services recently won a major contract with French public-service broadcaster TF1. The deal covers the design and buildout of a tapeless production system for all TF1 news and sports programming.

The new facilities will be built at TF1 headquarters in Boulogne, France, and will host and manage production of all of TF1 news programming, as well as that of 24-hour news channel LCI.

A fully functional backup production system is being built as part of disaster-recovery planning, too, and a third test and development system is being built to help TF1 assess updates to the system and test new platforms as they emerge.

Ascent Media also inked a five-year contract for ongoing technical support once installation of the new systems are complete.

The TF1 system will be built around a Dalet Media Asset Management platform that manages the system's entire workflow and integrates with the existing newsroom computer system and archive management. In the main system 26 channels of video are being ingested and a further 40 played-out from an Omneon server platform. Exanet NAS solutions will manage 96 TB of redundant storage provided by DataDirect Networks across the main and backup systems. Apple Final Cut Pro was chosen as the sole editing platform.